Letters to the Editor
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NERC projections
Back in the early '80s I was working at a major engineering construction firm that built a lot of power plants. I was working in the finance department doing research for the senior economist & was assigned to pull together some numbers on electrical demand projections.
I was pointed to NERC data because they were considered the most authoritative source in the industry. When I looked at their projections it was both easy and hard to understand why--easy because they always projected hyper growth in demand, so they provided endless justification for investment in more plants; hard because every year actual demand growth was well below their projection of just a few years prior. A graph I produced compiling a decade of their projections looked like a bunch of curved blades of grass, each curving sharply upward, but each starting at close to the same level because actual demand growth was much, much slower than NERC's projection.
Any growth using the currently dominant power-generating technologies is problematic, to say the least, so I don't differ with the author's conclusions. However, NERC should be seen as the industry hack they are and their projections should be read as pure marketing palbum. That the media uncritically trumpets these projections and stirs the pot of scarcity fear for the industry's profit is sadly just another manifestation of the dysfunction of our system, and is as much or more to blame for the fix we're in as all the knuckle-dragging of the Bush administration.